Chilly Scenes of Winter

One of the most anticipated events of the current season is Florida
Grand Opera's upcoming world premiere of Anna Karenina. ARLO
McKINNON talks to Anna composer David Carlson, who
collaborated with Colin Graham on this opera adaptation of
Tolstoy's novel.

David
Carlson came to major attention in 1996, with the world premiere of
Dreamkeepers at Utah Opera. His newest opera - and his most
ambitious to date - is Anna Karenina, which has its world
premiere in April at Florida Grand Opera in Miami and will be
reprised this summer at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. In all of
Carlson's operas, one hears influences of the late works of Richard
Strauss, yet Carlson's sound is tinged with a harmonic and melodic
openness more characteristic of the American symphonists. Form is
never an end in itself for this composer, as it sometimes can be in
the works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg and especially Hindemith. In
his first opera, The Midnight Angel (1993), for instance,
Carlson begins a waltz but moves in other directions after merely
implying the waltz. And just as he is not afraid to apply
the techniques and colors of the avant-garde, he is perfectly at
home with the grandly tonal gesture.

Carlson's Anna Karenina librettist, OTSL artistic director
Colin Graham, has a long history with the subject. Originally, he
prepared the outline of a libretto for Benjamin Britten, a few
years before the composer's death. It was to be given its premiere
at the Bolshoi Opera, but Britten withdrew from the project because
of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Then, in the early
1980s, Graham directed British composer Iain Hamilton's Anna
Karenina. These two collaborations helped Graham to refine his
ideas about how best to present an operatic treatment of what many
regard as Tolstoy's greatest novel.

OPERA NEWS: What motivated you to take on Anna
Karenina as an opera topic?
DAVID CARLSON: Well, it was in 1993. The Midnight Angel
was being done at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and Colin Graham
had liked the music very much. He came up to me after the dress
rehearsal and said that he was thinking of doing an Anna
Karenina. He had some sketches of a libretto, just sort of a
treatment, he wanted me to look at. Immediately I said, "Yes, of
course - I mean, how wonderful!" Then, in about 2001, Florida Grand
Opera was going to commission an opera for their new house and knew
of this potential collaboration, and they signed us on. That's how
that happened. It sort of chose me.
ON: How long a process was it to compose this work?
DC: Well, I thought about the music for many years, from 1993
until I was commissioned to write the opera. I always had it in the
back of my mind, and I kept a few little sketches. When I found out
it was going to be time to compose it, I really thought about it
again for another year. That's when I went to Russia and just tried
to imagine what is this music, what will it be? So, it ended up
being just like the other two operas. I wrote the music [in my own
voice] and then tinted it with Russian colors and melodic arches,
melodic constructions and of course the nineteenth-century
orchestra. For this story, it just seemed like I needed to go to
nineteenth-century colors.
ON: I was very curious to see how the libretto could be
condensed from the novel, and I think Colin Graham did a very good
job of leaving out the things that are really non-operatic, such as
Levin's relationship with his workers.
DC: Absolutely. You know, I've had people come to me saying
things like, well, "Do you have Russian farm scenes?" and "Do you
have an ice-skating scene?" and all these things that just aren't
really essential to the plot. It's all the philosophizing about
farming, really. So Colin got rid of that and got it down to the
emotional. It's very emotional.
ON: And I recognize specific lines from Tolstoy.
DC: Yes. He did use actual lines, which, of course, gives it
even more - I shouldn't say gravitas, but truth. Truth. It's
just wonderful. And some of those lines set themselves to music
rather well, because, although it's in English, the words are still
poetic. Isn't the novel incredible?
ON: It is indeed. One of the things I liked best about it was
the fact that Tolstoy himself does not seem to take sides with the
characters.
DC: That's it! That's exactly what we were after. It's all
presented from each character's point of view. And in the novel, do
you remember the hunting scene where even the dog has a viewpoint?
That took me aback when I first read it. I thought it was
brilliant.
ON: Let's talk a little about the music. I like the bleak,
dismal sound of Karenin's music and the dreamy quality in Anna's
music.
DC: Yes, you got it right. And of course, the orchestration
takes it a step further. With one exception, I have used a
nineteenth-century orchestra, obviously on purpose. The one
instrument that is not is the vibraphone, which occurs in her
dream, where she keeps hearing the tapping coming back, that sound
of tapping? She has seen the railway worker after that first scene
where the guy's run over, and the vibraphone adds a dreamy tapping
sound to it. But other than that, it's entirely something
Tchaikovsky could have used. And that's just to help capture the
sound world that I was after.

I went to Russia and stayed there for quite a while and wrote down
how the bells sounded at the Kazan Cathedral, which is right near
the train station. So that comes back at the end of the opera just
before she's jumping, when she's going nutty and hearing all of the
bells. It's a very specific kind of rhythm. And I've used Orthodox
chant - not sung, but in the orchestra.

Are you familiar with the Tsar's Hymn? I've written my own
little variation of it, and Tchaikovsky used it in the 1812
Overture. What I was trying to do was use that motif, the same
way Tchaikovsky did in his Fourth Symphony - you know, the fate
motif? Well, the way he used it, it comes back at what I consider
pivotal points in a dramatic story that he's telling in music, in
absolute music. It comes back in variation. So I used that idea.
For me, it means fate, just as it did for Tchaikovsky.
ON: In both Dreamkeepers and Midnight Angel,
there is a touch of the magical world. I was wondering if your
switch to a more verismo approach here was a product of the
circumstance you found yourself in or a conscious choice, that you
wanted to move specifically there.
DC: Well, I sort of found myself there with the story when it
all came together. But I didn't change my musical style. I mean, I
was able to make magic out of emotions, I think. For example, when
Anna has just told her husband of her affair with Vronsky, that
fate motif, the Tsar's Hymn, comes back. But it's very high
and tinkling and celestial. It's magical. For me, the way she must
have felt at that moment was an ethereal lightness and having the
weight of the world taken off her shoulders - an admission of
guilt. So I used magical sounds to try to depict that.
ON: Later on in the opera you use a technique from
indeterminacy, what when I was in school we called "Berio boxes."
[A technique in which the performer, rather than performing a set
musical passage, is required to choose one of a number of musical
possibilities from a box appearing on the page, this method first
appeared in Luciano Berio's masterwork Circles.]
DC: Aleatoric music. We called them Berio boxes, too. I used
that to depict the laudanum. A little haze there! And they come
back towards the end, the very end. You wouldn't know from the
vocal score, but there are twenty music boxes wound up and playing
at the same time. [You could say that this is], say, a
morphia-induced touch. In the novel it's very obvious she's
addicted to morphia. And Tolstoy just simply mentions it in passing
- "She took her usual dose of laudanum or morphia and went to
sleep." But actually she had taken quite a bit, a double dose
before she goes to the train station the final time. So really, I
believe, not to make too much of a point of it, but this is a
component of her insanity, and it colors the music.

Tolstoy was so subtle in his mentioning of the morphia, you know?
It was just here and there, but, as we all know, it was a problem
in upper society in the late-nineteenth century. And I think he put
it in there incredibly subtly, just because that's how he does
things. It's just so delicately stated that you have to find it,
you have to notice it. And I've never seen it portrayed in any of
the treatments, ever.
ON: Is there a character in Anna Karenina with whom you
personally might identify?
DC: Sadly, Anna herself. [Laughs.] I've battled
depression most of my life. And my sister committed suicide, so I
actually had an inside line on how Anna was feeling, if that makes
any sense. I mean, I'm O.K., but I have an affinity for Anna. I
really do.

ARLO MCKINNON is a composer, music consultant and
music-preparation specialist.